Heres a fact you might not know  Connecticut is one of only SIX states in the U.S. that doesnt have a type of assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) law (sometimes referred to as involuntary outpatient treatment). Theres no one standard for these types of laws, but (roughly speaking) these are laws that allow for people with mental illness to be forcibly treated BEFORE they commit a serious crime. Whereas previous legal standards held that the mentally ill cannot be institutionalized or medicated until they harm someone or themselves, or until they express an immediate intent to do so, AOT laws (again, roughly speaking) allow for preventativeinstitutionalization or forced medication (I highly recommend reading the data cited in the link I provided in this paragraph, especially regarding what is known as first episode psychosis).

AOT laws vary state-by-state, and often bear the name of a person murdered by an untreated mentally ill person (Kendras Law in New York, Lauras Law in California, etc.).

Earlier this year, Connecticut considered passing an AOT law (and a weak one, at that), and it failed, due to protests from civil liberties groups.

Great post.
I intend to help bump this all night and all day tomorrow.

It’s sadly ironic that the same crowd that supports the African communist Ubama votes the same way as these Democrat “civil liberties” groups that think it’s a great idea to leave maniacs like this punk Lanza untreated and on the street.

In Jackson Michigan last summer a man killed and elderly woman and cut her head off. Police found him in her clothes. He said that the neighbor was spying on him and emanating rays at him.

It turned out that his family had been trying to have him hospitalized for years but nobody could hold him for more than a few days. Eventually the family drove him away with a final warning to the courts that someone is going to die. A year later an elderly neighbor did die.

4
posted on 12/15/2012 5:10:47 PM PST
by cripplecreek
(REMEMBER THE RIVER RAISIN!)

re post 12, The shooter, Adam, apparently had no record of criminal behavior due to mental problems and had not come to the attention of the police or public as to having problems. That’s what is needed to be involuntarily treated under the law discussed here.

I wonder if the lack of coming to the attention of the authorities was due to the intense sheltering of him by his mother and the great efforts she is now described as making to care for him? She had withdrawn him from high school and home schooled him as he did not fit well in a school setting. He seemed to have no job and lived in her home. Was Adam on SSI and had a professional evaluated him to sign that he was eligible due to emotional problems?

I am not blaming her for this. The fact that other mental problem individuals get noticed is often due to lack of the family to be able to control that person at home and lack of will or resources to keep control.

17
posted on 12/15/2012 5:49:36 PM PST
by RicocheT
(Eat the rich only if you're certain it's your last meal)

Those aren’t typically used to treat personality disorders, but even if they were — should all autistics, Aspergers, schizoids, schizoaffectives, etc., etc., be prophalactically medicated to pacify them? Why not just go for the lobotomy? I don’t think we want to go there.

The left may have wanted it, but Reagan had possession of the veto pen, didn’t he? I’m a strong lover of RR, but this as well as the amnesty were 2 very foolish things he did as president. None of them is perfect, and RR was probably the best we have had in decades, but he, wasn’t perfect either.

There’s just not going to be an easy fix for this no matter who claims there can be. Irrational behavior cannot be rationally explained. The “Opportunity Costs” on this are high. Every decision made and action taken has a cost. If you buy a McDonalds hamburger, there is a “cost” to that Burger King restaurant next door. Your decision “cost” them some business. The money you spent on that hamburger also “cost” that panhandler because you didn’t give him the money. “Opportunity Costs” are usually discussed in describing a decision a business has made to allocate resources. Spending money for advertising means that money wasn’t spent for employee training. There is nothing good that is going to come from this horror, but, perhaps, an analysis of opportunity costs as it relates to this murderer could be useful.

27
posted on 12/15/2012 6:21:06 PM PST
by blueunicorn6
("A crack shot and a good dancer")

In reviewing some information regarding Adam Lanza. The newest DSM 5 which comes out in 2013. the researchers are battling over the issue Aspergers Syndrome. It has only been since 1991, that Aspergers Syndrome has been part of the discussions as a learning disability Pervasive Developmental Disorder. Basically to sum up = Adam fell through the cracks of the Psychologists in America whom are bickering over what is and what is not Aspergers Syndrome a autism spectrum disorder, or sometimes referred to a social disorder.

the liberals want to ban guns - wait a moment Adam.s mother took him along to the shooting range. his mother was a gun collector. so most likely he knew how to shoot a gun how to aim and so forth. Wonder did he go through a course on CCW, hunter safety when younger?

Note he tried to buy a gun recently but the gun Laws of Connecticut stopped him from making the purchase, because of the waiting period.

I know two families who have school-age children with severe developmental problems. In the one case, online schooling is the only solution because the child is so unhappy when in a school setting. Unfortunately I’m afraid everyone will start looking at these kids as the next shooter to go off the deep end. Do not blame the Mom for this, the Mom has probably been going thru hell for years.

Apparently it has been reported that she pulled him out of school because she did not like what the school was doing. So there was conflict between her and the school with the autistic child between the two. So he was 20 years old and still finishing High School education ?

“Just out of curiosity which particular medication would this be? I understand the USSR outpatient clinics in Siberia offered some mighty potent ones. “

Well, what *was* done didn’t work out very well, did it?

A crazy person has an inalienable right to walk around unrestrained and unmedicated until after he hurts someone. But the Left/Gov’t will blame this tragedy on *your* gun and expect you to be happy to give it up.

This hit it home for me. The perp I had to put down had shot a gun into a house with someone he was mad at inside, back when he was a minor.

30 years later he was threatening to kill his ex and me and the law could not and would not do anything. Fortunately, he was chased off at his ex’s house by shotgun and then headed to my place to gun me down. I was waiting in the dark house with a .44 and survived his attack. 911 had over an hour to intercept him and didn’t. They held me in jail on murder 2 for lack of half a million bail while they “sorted” it out.

I wonder if the 25 year old who killed his father and father’s girlfriend with a bow and arrow, then killed himself (Nov 30 Wyoming) had the same psychiatrist.

He drove from Vernon, Ct to Wyoming to kill

VERNON, Conn.  A man who police say killed his father, a woman and himself in Wyoming on Friday told a neighbor in Connecticut weeks before the killings that he believed his father gave him Asperger’s syndrome and said his dad should be “castrated” to prevent him from having more children.

your right. The point is what was she supposed to do with him? as an adult she couldn’t force him to get help. she can’t tie him up in the basement. maybe she should have gotten rid of her guns but whose to say he couldn’t have gotten more some where else? I’m waiting to hear more about the mother and what kind of help she sought for her son. if she tried and was not getting any help there will be hell to pay.

Just an observation, but we might all be shocked to find around 20k of these “Adam-kids” wandering around the US currently. Some are medicated...some are not. The parents are quietly growing older and simply pretending that things are manageable and the ‘kid’ will grow into their twenties and thirties....living at home...and be ‘safe’. In this naive state....we are all living amongst sleeping zombies...waiting for them to awaken.

He was medicated. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/adam-lanza-is-recalled-as-a-rambunctious-kid-with-family-problems/2012/12/14/795ad0fe-4641-11e2-8e70-e1993528222d_story.html

That's the problem . They are putting way to many kinds on drugs like prozac for minor issues and they end up doing really crazy things . Almost all these young people that have committed these mass murders have been on these types of medications . There have been lots of studies that prove these drugs are tied to suicide especially when taken by young people . I know a family who went through this personally , the teenage daughter was put on these drugs because she was a spoiled brat who had temper tantrums . She ended up shooting herself and almost killed both her parents . Lots of doctors know these drugs are causing these kinds of problems BUT NO ONE is talking about it .Everyone is too busy trying to ban the guns .

One begins to wonder if the fascists in our gov’t - who know the first step in taking over a country is the necessity of stripping citizens of their guns - didn't go to the drug companies and make a deal to develop these drugs - for this purpose. The fact that these gun-controllers, from the president on down, were loud and clear in demanding gun-control, using this tragedy for their agenda, while those little bodies were still in that school speaks volumes!

Yes, such evil exists. It operates on such high levels because decent people can't conceive of such raw evil. We need to acknowledge it.

We need to let our politicians and media KNOW we know - and know THEY know - and demand they answer us individually.

BAN THESE DRUGS...and those that demand gun-control. They are even more dangerous.

48
posted on 12/15/2012 9:12:40 PM PST
by maine-iac7
(Christian is as Christian does - by their fruits)

One of the problems is that doctors, seeing the impossibility of hospitalizing patients (especially adolescents), tend to hand out drugs like candy hoping that will do something to control the patient. Many of these drugs should really be used only under close supervision, but that’s not possible.

Adolescents present a particular problem because that is often the time when the serious mental disorders suddenly appear (schizophrenia, etc.) and yet while there were once entire hospitals that specialized in caring for and attempting to treat adolescent patients (California had a gem of a hospital for this purpose, prior to deinstitutionalization) there is really nothing doctors can do now except order a brief (3-day) committment when the child gets suicidal or violent - and give them drugs. I had a friend whose manic-depressive son went through years of brief committments and finally, a few hours after the last one, did manage to kill himself. The family, in the meanwhile, had virtually lived in the emergency room or at the police station; they were completely destroyed, the parents divorced, and the other children in the family, who had never had decent childhoods themselves because everything was invested in caring for their older brother, were left bitter and alienated.

So in the case of your friend, a long term comittment at an adolescent facility might have helped her, because perhaps she really was more than a spoiled brat; or if she really was just a spoiled brat, this would have given everybody time to sort it out. Sometimes adolescents react better if they are out of a particular family environment. But handing out drugs is about all psychiatrists can do right now.

My objection is to givnig drugs for the minor (and, in my opinion, non-existent) disorders such as “ADD” and other mysterious “learning disorders,” which really are often just disciplinary or behavioral problems or at worst, developmental problems that would probably resolve themselves in a few years, especially with young children. In fact, giving them drugs probably interferes with their development and makes the problem worse.

So I agree that it’s true that sometimes parents who have created an uncontrollable and hostile child simply through poor upbringing are looking to drugs for a magical cure for the monster they have created. But at other times, there is a genuinely serious problem that may be exacerbated by poor parenting but is something that goes way beyond that and might be controllable by drugs - but certainly needs more comprehensive treatment than just the occasional handful of pills in an unsupervised environment.

Medications are not all bad. I have seen people whose lives were utterly tormented by paranoid hallucinations suddenly experience peace when the right combination of anti-psychotics was found. But this needs supervision, either in a full-time residential facility for the more fragile cases, or in some more open setting where there is still regular monitoring. When people are having an “episode,” they’re not pretending: they really do think they’re being stalked by monsters or that somebody is “listening to their brain waves” through their fillings, and they’re genuinely terrified and are not going to go for help voluntarily.

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